Normal for whom? Just because it's contrary to what's found in my community doesn't necessarily mean that it's a problem or that it's unhealthy. While I've not a mind to lookup the statistics I'd have to guess there are some European countries that would, when compared to those standards, have populations composed mostly of alcoholics.

The thought of not being in possession of my faculties and not being able to tell scares me.

Just my 2cp, but it sounds like you are a tightwad. Save when people are really wasted, in my experience people don't act so much differently from their sober selves when drunk. If you're actually, in your own words, scared of doing something slightly aberrant, then I'd say you're pretty uptight.

Given he was hospitalized for three weeks I'd say he was probably genuinely addicted.

Being open has a lot to do with why there are a lot of slick looking phone.

This study is absolutely useless as a result: a homeless man interested in business and finance would still qualify as a "selfish elite" under these methods.

I know what you mean. When I was on the subway yesterday I was reading the Wall Street Journal, and this guy comes up and asks if I have any spare change. While I put my paper down he catches a glimpse of it and says "Shit, my Lockheed stock dropped another two points!"

http://xkcd.com/670/

They haven't lost in a fair fight since Korea.

Could you tell me the last time the US engaged in something that could accurately be described as a fair fight? You might be able to make a case for Vietnam but outside that it's pretty much been case after case of the 250 pound football jock beating up the 90 pound chess club president.

I actually don't think it's really because the Republicans are necessarily bigger liars per se, at least not until the last decade an a half or so. The Fox Network has more or less made them out to be, and it's what's ultimately killing the Republican party.

Rupert Murdoch went to the then ruling party and said "If you deregulate so I can own all the media I want, Fox News will say whatever is good for your party", and the Republicans happily agreed. But Fox is in the business of making money, and it's very profitable to abandon the truth in favor of something more conspiratorial and exciting, something the Republicans probably didn't count on. They thought they were more or less buying Fox News with that transaction, but it seems more like they, at least in part, more-so sold themselves to Fox.

The extent to which we've removed humans from the battlefield is really starting to disturb me. The public objection to American coming home in body bags up 'til the past decade has served as at least a mild deterrent to using force, but when we can kill with little or no risk to our own soldiers, what's left to provide our leaders with a motive for restraint?

Egh...

Does it make sense for an author to sit on works they're not publishing? No. Does it make sense for a giant publishing conglomerate to viciously attack someone violating the copyright of an out of print book of someone they 'represent'? Yes. It's basically about controlling market volume. Preventing the distribution of books you're no longer printing (nor have any interest in printing) basically keeps the older works from competing with your newer works. If you're no longer interest in printing a particular title there's no reason I shouldn't be able to, but you as a publisher have a vested interest in preventing this competition.

China has a group of ppl that control and seek greater control not less.

So do we, we call them politicians.

Does the U.S. really want to be like China or Iran?

It seems pretty arrogant to assume we're so much different from either of them, every civil liberty violation we point at in our adversaries we see through the goggles of an outsiders opinion. How does it look to an outsider that we held hundreds of people for the better part of a decade with no right to a trial, that the CEO of the only telephone company who told the NSA they needed a warrant is now in jail, that the government tried to suppress video footage of an Apache gunning down good samaritan, so on and so forth.

We like to envision the citizens of countries we don't care for as helpless prisoners or demonic dictators but the reality is probably about half the citizens think the governments wonderful and doing a great job, and half think they're evil tyrants, just like here.

Many people who are customer of Comast are out of necessity, not choice. All the same, it has a couple of implications for non-customers with an overriding theme of big media maintaining their control on culture distribution.

Prior to the Internet broadcast video content had something of a natural monopoly simply by the limited bandwidth over the airwaves. The Internet has a lot of potential to change that because it doesn't suffer from the same limitation. I consume a great deal of "TV Show" like content that's not on TV so my Internet connection is essentially competing with the TV Networks.

To demonstrate, hypothetically say I'm a recent film student grad who has a great idea for a TV show (and for the sake of argument lets pretend it is good). I've enough money to produce it myself, but I have no notoriety and have zero chance of getting a network to distribute it. Alternatively, I could put it up on the web, try and get some ad revenue, or maybe if good enough charge users to download. But now, I'm competing with Comcast/NBC and since Comcast/NBC is in both content and distribution, they may well 'traffic shape' in such a way that interferes with traffic of competing products, so out of the gate my potential audience is reduced by 30% (or whatever Comcast's market share is).

That's the problem with this, and what's more important, that why they want to merge.

A textbook example of what our anti-trust laws are supposed to address a company using it's monopoly in one market (OS) to trying and gain an advantage in another market (search).

Sigh...